


You Must Remember This

by AJHall



Series: LoPiverse [7]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark Past, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Memory Alteration, Rescue, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-19
Updated: 2019-01-19
Packaged: 2019-10-12 16:03:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17470634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AJHall/pseuds/AJHall
Summary: Obliviateis onehellof a drug. With the emphasis on thehell.One of the unintended consequences of the events ofLust Over Pendle





	You Must Remember This

**Author's Note:**

> I was asked in a comment what my headcanon was for Melanie and was reminded I'd written this snippet but not pursued the story.

“Melanie!”

The sound of her first name shouted in a deep North-Country accent at top volume across the unattractive concrete wasteland of the shopping precinct made her turn where she stood, even while the more rational part of her brain told her: _It must be someone else. No-one even knows you’re here. That was the whole idea. Remember?_

Nevertheless, almost instinctively, she turned. And, indeed the hefty young man heading determinedly in her direction did, it seemed, want to speak to her, however deluded – threatening? homicidal? - he might turn out to be.

She was intimately familiar with spotty adolescent official strangers behind Perspex screens in DSS offices asking her intrusive questions about her sex life or earning potential. Strangers in any another context were something else again. She was used to being invisible to them.

The young man who was bellowing at her was, at least, pleasant-looking enough. He might, she thought, churning her brains into a half-forgotten pattern that denoted critical awareness, be even attractive.

_If that were ever going to be relevant to you.  
And as if he’d notice what you thought of him, anyway._

Against her better judgment she turned to look him full in the face. Despite a nagging consciousness that told her that features meant nothing, she warmed instantly to his rough-hewn, broken-nosed physique. 

_Trusting appearances, now? As if!_

“Melanie! We’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

She gaped feebly at him. He extended a hand and, only then, it appeared, did he recognise that she was not responding to his overtures. He put his head on one side.

“It’s Neville. Neville Longbottom. Remember? From – um – Wiltshire?”

That, of course, had been where she had spent her year out. She knew – more than she wanted – about Wiltshire. 

Though not enough, obviously.

A sudden thought struck her and she looked up at him.

_Perhaps – god knows – if he was around then – he might look like a stranger – but then, after all – to not remember something like that – like Mum said – it’s not the sort of thing any normal girl would forget - I must have been out of my tree at the time –_

Looking sidelong under her eyelids she covertly surveyed his features, measuring – as one might, though with inevitable imprecision, folds and shades of skin, angles of brows, colour of eyes–

There was no vestige of Anna in any of them, she ruefully concluded. Whatever else he was, this was not the man.

 

“I’m sorry,” she began hesitantly. His face clouded, and he looked, for a moment, angry. She took a hesitant half-step back, away from him. He wrinkled his brow, and sighed.

“Sorry. Not you. So I take it the Ministry finally caught up with you with _Obliviate_ , did they?”

“What do you -?”

He shook his head.

“It doesn’t matter. Look, can I buy you a coffee? Or lunch – it’s getting on to that time? We really have been incredibly worried about you. And – looks like I’m going to have to do more explaining than I’d expected, obviously.”

Her mother’s training cut in, automatically, even as she recognised its source and hated herself for still obeying its inner promptings.

“Look – I – there’s someone waiting for me -”

_Don’t speak to strange men – don’t let them try to get you somewhere alone – don’t let them think they’ve got you isolated - they’re only after one thing –_

His brows creased; she thought irritation and a certain reluctant amusement were warring for dominance in his expression. 

“Well,” he said after a pause, “I know this is slightly unconvincing given – I take it – that from your point of view you’ve never met me before. But I really am surprisingly respectable, you know, despite appearances. And – um – really completely nothing of a threat to you. For which I can bring witnesses. ” There was another pause. He coughed.

“Actually, if it helps, as a matter of fact I’m Caitlin’s cousin. Though there’s certainly no reason you could be expected to know that, in the circs.”

“Caitlin?” 

The familiar name in his unfamiliar voice swung the whole bizarre situation round by a dizzying 180 degrees.

_So he really could have met you, then._

She hesitated momentarily. Of course, given he knew about Wiltshire, this could be a trap too, but – given who she was, who would ever bother? And this might be the only chance she could get, to know anything. 

And it would be so nice – just to know. Anything.

She gulped, and took the plunge.

“You mean, Caitlin Naismith? At Gaia’s Place?”

He nodded. “Yes. Phew. At least they left you able to remember her. I was beginning to wonder just how much of your life they had decided to help themselves to.”

He paused, surveyed her, and added parenthetically and with considerable venom, “The bastards.”

Something – a bright glimpse of release, of hope against hope – began to struggle up through the layers of suspicion, and pain, and sheer bruising exhaustion that had over-grimed the surface of her vision for longer now than she cared to remember.

_He doesn’t seem to think I’m mad. Or deliberately concealing the truth from sheer stubbornness. Or in – what’s that phrase the social workers love so much? Denial._

There was a sharp prickle of tears behind her eyes, and the sudden warm weight of a human hand on her arm, as soon withdrawn as he – Neville – realised that in their present state of acquaintanceship – whatever might have been true in the fogged, treacherous past – it was a wholly inappropriate familiarity.

“Sorry,” he said rather formally. And then, with a self-conscious air of getting down to business, he added,

“Look, should we skip over a few things? Would you feel more inclined to trust me if I said; yes, I do know that you’ve got a large unexplained gap in your memory? And that no-one you’ve tried to tell about it believes you?”

Her mouth, she knew, had gaped open in sheer shock. He smiled at her, somehow managing to convey both reassurance and, improbably, apology in his glance. She gulped again, hard.

“Look, I don’t know how -” She broke off, not sure if her voice could hold steady through the remainder of the sentence. He looked at her, his head on one side, waiting for her to pull herself together. She tried again.

“I wasn’t – um – just prevaricating, earlier. There really is someone waiting for me – I – ah – look, do you mind coming with me?”

Without allowing him time to respond, she caught his hand, and pulled him up the stained, fake-marble steps of the precinct, towards where Mrs Rigby – for the second time a grandmother at the ripe age of 39 – was pushing the two strollers back and forward with a mulish look.

“I am so sorry,” she gasped. “I really did mean to be five minutes – but then I bumped into Neville – Neville – Mrs Rigby, my neighbour - ”

Mrs Rigby – _Eleanor Rigby, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door_ \- transfigured her expression into a horrific display of decaying teeth. Improbably, Neville seemed to have decoded it as a forgiving smile before Melanie needed to translate.

“I’m so sorry to put you out,” he said politely, extending a hand. Mrs Rigby shook it vigorously.

“No problem, ducks,” she said amiably. “And do call me Tracey. Now, how come you know Melanie, eh-?”

Her eye passed speculatively over him and down towards the nearer stroller, which she had somewhat pointedly released into Melanie’s possession. Melanie felt herself flushing hotly. Apparently deaf, Neville inclined his head over the stroller with an expression of polite interest. Anna, wakening out of the sleep she had been coaxed into before Melanie had left her in Mrs Rigby’s erratic care, yowled resentfully up at him. He wiggled his hand in from of her small snub nose in a rapid, blurred gesture and her cat-like mewlings converted themselves, on the fly, into entranced gurgles. Her green eyes followed his finger movements intently.

“Anna,” Melanie said, in a tone of explanation which – she was at some cold remove aware - explained nothing. The child’s startlingly green eyes widened at the sound of her name, and she sat up in the stroller wiggling her hand cheerfully back at him, and blowing bubbles.

Mrs Rigby looked speculatively at him.

“Little ones of your own, have you got?”

 _And don’t call me Yoda_ , Melanie’s brain interpolated, inappropriately, before she spotted that that, at least, seemed to have overset the strange young man’s self-possession.

“No,” he said with a determined air, and a complexion like a Victoria plum.

Mrs Rigby sighed. “Pity. Like magic, that was. Put it up in a bottle and sell it, and you’d make a fortune.”

“Anyway,” Neville said, a trifle too loudly, “We have to be going, Melanie. The car’s just along here -”

“You’ll be lucky,” Tracey Rigby pronounced, with a profound air of schadenfreude. “That’s not free parking until after twelve, and them arsey bastards were out in force, earlier – ”

Neville raised his brows in polite bafflement.

“Arsey bastards?”

She gaped at him. “Traffic wardens, ducks. Anyway, you’ll be lucky if you haven’t been clamped, by now.”

He paused, considering. “I’d be surprised,” he said. “I should think it knows enough to dodge if it sees them coming in its direction.”

Tracey Rigby sniggered. The young man looked blankly at her. Reality, suddenly, seemed to shimmer around them. And then there was a cool but firm hand on Melanie’s wrist, and the stroller had apparently achieved a will of its own, and was pulling her out of the shopping precinct, out of Mrs Rigby’s orbit – she stood behind open-mouthed -- Melanie let it take her where it would – 

Out of the whole of her life as it existed before.


End file.
